This is quite an interesting but very hybrid book. Wengrow seems to be trying to refute Samuel Huntington's thesis on the clash of civilizations. The author is particularly opposed to the very static interpretation that Huntington gave to the concept of civilization, namely as if these were more or less separate containers. He is certainly not the only or the first one to give this justified criticism. The problem is that Wengrow then goes on to deal with very different aspects of ancient Near E...

Archaeologist David Wengrow has written a cautionary political tract relating the ancient Near East to “the future of the West.” Most pointedly, his What Makes Civilization? is a critique of Francis Fukuyama's “The End of History?” (1989) and Samuel Huntington's “The Clash of Civilizations?” (1993). Fukuyama's thesis optimistically predicted “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Huntington's pessimistic rejoinder asserted that with the cessati...

A very good book which looks at the two main civilisations of the Near East - Sumerian and Egyptian - and looks at how they were inter-related, through culture, trade, religious practice and ideas. The book is well written and readable, with much of interest to say. A concluding section examines how the notion of 'the birth of civilisation in the Near East' has contributed to Western ideas of our own genesis. The earlier sections on the nature of religious practice and commerce are particularly

- civilization = the capacity of societies to form a moral community (an extended field of exchange and interaction) despite differences of ethnicity, language, belief systems or territorial affiliation- archaeological traces show that farming on the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates was done in a non-centralized manner (in Iran and Iraq in the 6th millennium BC, in Syria in the 4th millennium BC), in small scale irrigation systems => cooperation + conflict resolution- Tigris and Euphrates had less fav...

What Makes Civilization? pretty much says it all right there in the title. The author, Prof. David Wengrow, is a Comparative Anthropologist at University College London. What Prof. Wengrow had produced is a reasonably accessible introduction to the oft maligned, but necessary, concept of civilization. What is civilization? Who is civilized [watch out for this one]? What constitutes civilization and why? These are some of the many questions asked and mostly answered. The short answer seems to be

Really interesting idea for a book supported by some really interesting and often convincing ideas. For a book with ideas on this scale, however, I would have liked more concrete examples and analyses to illustrate and support these ideas better. I have a PhD and sometimes it wasn't entirely clear to me what was the author was arguing I think because of the lack of concrete examples.

David Wengrow (b. 1972) is a British specialist in the archeology of the ancient Near East. In this book, he highlights various aspects of the peoples and cultures of this area, spanning the period from the earliest Neolithic times (about 9,000 BCE) to the classical antiquity. The focus is, as you would expect, on ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, but Wengrow is making geographical forays to Europe and Iran-Afghanistan, and even touching upon the perception of the ancient period in early modern Eur...

In What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West, David Wengrow argues the connections of Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt with the West go beyond the perception of the former as the birthplace of civilization. He does this by dissolving the concept of distance and arguing that civilization consists of the exchange of culture between different societies. Part 1 of his book focuses on a discussion of metals, gems, food preparation, food cultivation, trade, currency, dwell...

This is one of the best books I have read in the last year or so.There is more meat here than in books twice its size.Points worth considering:The short comings of the Three Age SystemDifferences and similarities in river valley culturesThe way the collective interacts with the divine (comparisons between Egyptian and Mesopotamian practice)Dynastic culturesThe uses of the ancient near east in the self conception of the modern west.This book jumps from Sumer to the steppe to the French Revolution...

The author states in his introduction that this book is, at least in part, a reply to Samuel Huntington’s assertion that ancient civilizations only rarely “clashed” (that is, interacted). He sets out to show Huntington wrong by providing evidence for extensive cultural sharing between two ancient cultures: Egypt and Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq and Syria). The first—and longest—part of the book is a detailed accounting of evidence for such cultural sharing. Perhaps it’s me, but this struck me as...

3-3.5 starsWhat Makes Civilization? is simultaneously a dense and incomplete book, great as an overview but imperfect for someone looking to deeply explore the growth of civilizations in this area. Instead, Wengrow is providing a counterargument to two predecessors in the field. He argues what seems an obvious point: that civilizations don’t evolve in vacuums. Focusing on primarily Mesopotamia and Egypt, he asserts that specialization isn’t what drives civilization development, but trade. What f...

This book is fantastic, but far too short. A wonderful forceful repudiation of the idea of the strict demarcation "between civilisations", Wengrow masterfully compares and contrasts ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian cooking, religion, and kingship. In the penultimate chapter, he also perfectly attacks the political dimensions of the genesis of modern museums, arguing that museums assert the liberal/secular order by stripping the sacred of their context and power."We have become accustomed to the...

This is an interesting take on the idea of civilisation applied in the context of the ancient Near East - based less on governance and technologies and much more on "... the capacity of societies to form a moral community - an extended field of exchange and interaction - despite differences in ethnicity, language, belief systems, or territorial affiliations." (p. xv). The themes explored include the interaction between the well-known (literate) civilisations of the Nile and Euphrates/Tigris (and...

Basically a shout of support to Edward Said contra Samuel Huntington, providing the archaeological backup for Said's claims that 'civilizations' are not "shut-down, sealed-off entities" that do nothing but 'clash', but usually share a history of "exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing." As such it probably succeeded, though I'm not the one to ask as I didn't really need convincing. I mainly read it as a general introduction to the ancient cultures in and around Mesopotamia and Egypt. As such

Wengrow's focus on the connections between ancient Near Eastern societies was eye-opening. He gave a good overview of the ways that the ancient residents of the lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean (and to some degree beyond) borrowed from each other, traded with each other, and influenced each other. His archaeologist's focus on material culture gave me a different perspective on the region, and it provided an interesting background from which to view the religious and political developmen...

A short but complete introduction to what is a civilization. The main difference is in the day to day.Something important that Wengrow showed is the formation of trust. Trust is the hallmark of the contact between different cities: I can trust you and you can trust me, so we can exchange. The use of seals to mark the merchandise and now the origin is later translated to religious worship, and also the religion is used to share the riches and put in sage place the taxes.A curious enigma of the ho...

As a "modern" historian mostly, I think I missed a lot of the finer points of this book. It's essentially a brief survey of several parts of early civilization in Europe, Africa and Asia that support Wengrow's essential thesis, and having not studied either of those eras I feel like I got a brief idea but a lot of it went over my head as well. In all though I appreciate what Wengrow is doing here: using strong evidence to argue that early civilizations participated in international cultural exch...